who made merry with Prince Hal, but would not renounce his faith, and
was finally given up by the over-orthodox young king to the bishops.
Henry V himself was present at the martyrdom, peculiarly revolting,
but the worst of it all is that Shakespeare, consciously or
unconsciously, endorsed the Roman Catholic caricature and wronged a
true and generous spirit in his ineffaceable portrait of Sir John
Falstaff, Prince Hal's "old lad of the castle." It must be that
Raggedstone Hill, which casts a curse on whomsoever its shadow
touches, gloomed with peculiar blackness over the hunted knight. Its
ominous shade is said to have stolen on Cardinal Wolsey and on those
royal fugitives of the Red Rose, Margaret of Anjou and the hapless
young Prince Edward.
[Illustration: TEWKESBURY ABBEY]
From the summit of Worcester Beacon and from other of the higher
Malvern crests the view ranges, on a clear day, over some fifteen
counties and embraces the six momentous battlefields of Shrewsbury,
Mortimer's Cross, Edge Hill, Worcester, Evesham and Tewkesbury, and the
three cathedrals of Hereford, Worcester, and Gloucester, besides the
remnants of six great religious houses of mediæval England,--Great and
Little Malvern, Pershore, Evesham, Deerhurst and Tewkesbury. Little
Malvern Priory, established in the twelfth century by a band of
Benedictine monks from Worcester who sought the wilds that they might
emulate the life of hermits, survives only in fragments, but the church
of Great Malvern Priory, an earlier outgrowth from Worcester, keeps its
Norman interior, with rich treasures of stained glass and miserere
carvings. We had passed through the Vale of Evesham toward the close of
our long Midland drive and seen the scant relics of its mitred abbey,
but we fail to follow the Avon on to Pershore, one of the richest and
most powerful of the old monastic foundations. Not only were these
monasteries planted in the fairest and most fruitful lands of the
county, but a large portion of Worcestershire was owned by them and by
the neighbouring abbeys of Gloucestershire. In all this horde of
priests one has a special claim to literary remembrance,--Layamon, who
dwelt in the hamlet of Ernley, near the junction of the Severn and the
Stour. He constitutes an important link in the passing on of the
Arthurian legend, which, first related in Latin prose by that
entertaining prelate, Geoffrey of Monmouth, had been already rendered
into French verse by Wace, the professional chronicler of the
Plantagenets. Layamon retold and amplified the story, using the French
poem as his basis, but aided by two other works whose identity is
doubtful.
"Layamon these books beheld and the leaves he turned. He them
with love beheld. Aid him God the Mighty! Quill he took with
his fingers, and wrote on book-skin, and the true words set
together, and the three books pressed into one."
We could pay only a flying visit to Malvern this summer, but in other
summers have resorted thither again and again for the refreshment of
the blithe air and pure water and of walking on those turfy hills
where many a grateful sojourner has left path or seat to ease the
climber's way.
Worcester, too, was familiar ground, and this time we gave but a few
hours to the "Faithful City," which paid so dearly for its steadfast
loyalty to Charles I. The unspeakable Parliamentarians proved nearly
as destructive as the Danes, who, in the ninth century and again in
the eleventh, had sacked it with fire and sword. The militant
Presbyterians wreaked their piety most of all upon the Cathedral,
leaving it roofless, its splendid glass all shattered, its brasses
wrenched away, its altars desecrated and torn down. We found the
red-brick town upon the Severn brisk and cheerful, with its proud
shop-window display of its own products, from the Royal Worcester
China to Worcestershire Sauce, with the deeply laden barges that
almost hid the river; its lively hop market; and its grunting sows,
each with her litter of recalcitrant little pigs, driven in a
meandering course through the main street by ruddy boys and girls. The
cathedral, whose memories embrace St. Dunstan and St. Wulfstan and
that stout-hearted old martyr of Oxford, Bishop Latimer--who had
himself once presided at the burning of a friar--uplifted our hearts
with its august vista of nave and choir. The crowned tenant of that
choir, King John, ought to be troubled in his gilded rest by the
proximity of a Prince Arthur, though not the Arthur to whom he did
such grievous wrong. The best of the cathedral is, to my thinking, the
solemn grace of the crypt, beneath whose light-pillared arches stand
about various stone figures of rueful countenance. After their
centuries of sunlight, high-niched on the central tower, the Restorer
has scornfully dislodged them and dungeoned them down here.
Just below Worcester the Severn is augmented by the Teme, which has
valiantly cut its way through the line of western hills to join the
court of Sabrina, and at Tewkesbury, on the Gloucester border, it
receives its most famous affluent, Shakespeare's Avon. Tewkesbury was
new to us, and we lingered there two days, wishing we might make them
twenty. As it was we had to forego the delightful trip on the Severn
to Deerhurst, an old monastic town whose pre-Norman church is said to
be of extremely curious architecture.
Tewkesbury Abbey, which outranks in size ten of the twenty-eight
English cathedrals, is one of the most illustrious churches in the
United Kingdom. Unlike most of the larger monastic establishments, it
was under the control of a succession of great families whose deeds
and misdeeds form no small part of the history of England. Fitz-Hamon,
kin to the Conqueror, swept away what buildings of the old Saxon abbey
he may have found there, and erected the magnificent Norman church
which still awes the beholder. The ashes of Fitz-Hamon, who died in
1107, rest near the High Altar. The next lord of Tewkesbury to be
buried in the Abbey was Gilbert de Clare, one of the signers of Magna
Charta. The name of his father, Richard de Clare, headed the list, and
one of the seven copies of the Great Charter was deposited in the
Abbey. Every lord of Tewkesbury after Gilbert de Clare was interred in
this church, which, for the next two hundred and fifty years, until
the lordship of Tewkesbury was absorbed into the Crown, grew ever more
splendid with costly monuments. The widow of Gilbert de Clare married
the brother of Henry III, Richard, Duke of Cornwall, but although she
thus became a countess of many titles and one of the first ladies of
the land, she asked, in dying, to be buried beside the husband of her
youth in Tewkesbury. To this her second husband would not agree, but
he was magnanimous enough to send her poor, homesick heart back to the
Abbey in a silver vase, which was duly placed in Earl Gilbert's marble
mausoleum.
The De Clares of Tewkesbury, Earls of Gloucester and Hereford, were a
warrior race. The second Gilbert, called the Red Earl, fought both
with Simon de Montfort, and against him, and the third Gilbert, his
son, fell at Bannockburn. By his early death the lordship of
Tewkesbury passed from the De Clares, who had held it for nearly a
century, to the young earl's brother-in-law, Hugh le Despencer. This
new Earl of Gloucester had succeeded Piers Gaveston in the perilous
favour of Edward II. When Roger de Mortimer, by the unhallowed aid of
Queen Isabel, triumphed over the king, the elder Despencer, a man of
ninety, was hanged at Bristol, and his son, Hugh le Despencer, crowned
with nettles, was swung from the gallows fifty feet high, in a hubbub
of mockeries and rejoicings, at Hereford. His widow collected the
scattered quarters of his body, exposed in various towns, and interred
them in the Abbey under a richly carved and coloured monument. The
Despencers, though no longer Earls of Gloucester, held the lordship of
Tewkesbury for wellnigh another hundred years, cherishing and
beautifying the fabric of the church and adding lavishly to its
memorials of bronze and marble and to its treasure of chalices, copes,
and jewels.
Early in the fifteenth century the male line of the Despencers became
extinct, and the Lady Isabel, sister of the last Lord Despencer,
succeeded to the ecclesiastical honours of the family. Married in the
Abbey at the age of eleven to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Worcester,
she was widowed ten years later and found her solace in building an
exquisite chapel, known as the Warwick Chantry, in her husband's
memory. Her second husband, cousin to the first, was Richard
Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, whom she commemorated in the still more
elaborate Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick; but she herself chose to lie at
Tewkesbury. Her daughter married Warwick the King-maker and became the
mother of two fair girls of most pathetic story. The elder, Isabel,
was wedded to George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward
III,--"false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence,"--who is supposed to have
been murdered in the Tower through the agency of his brother
Richard--drowned, the whisper went, in a butt of Malmsey wine. A
fortnight earlier his wife and an infant child had died, probably of
poison. A son and daughter survived, who, for the royal blood that
flowed in their veins, were regarded with uneasiness by the Tudor
kings and ultimately sent to the block. The daughter, Margaret
Plantagenet, superintended the education of the Princess Mary, and was
once described by Henry VIII himself as "the most saintly woman in
England." But she was the mother of Cardinal Pole, who had angered the
tyrant and was on the Continent out of his reach; so this reverend and
gracious lady, at the age of sixty-eight, had her stately head
clumsily hacked off by a prentice executioner on Tower Hill, where her
innocent brother had perished forty-two years before. The second
daughter of the Countess Isabel had an even more pitiful life than her
sister's, for her first husband was Prince Edward, the last
Lancastrian, and then, after he had been foully slain, she strangely
accepted the hand of one of his murderers, Richard of Gloucester, the
worst of the Yorkists, by whom she was soon, it would appear, coolly
put out of the world. A favourite saying of the county, probably
having reference to the extraordinary number and wealth of its
religious houses, runs: "As sure as God is in Gloucestershire," but
one can hardly read these tragedies of Tewkesbury without feeling
that the Devil has been no infrequent sojourner there.
The lamentable Wars of the Roses, which had drenched England with
blood, threw up their last red spray against the Abbey. The resolute
Queen Margaret and her son had attempted, with an army raised by the
Duke of Somerset, to get possession of Gloucester, but they found it
already held by the Yorkists and hastened on to Tewkesbury. Still
weary from their forced march, they were attacked by Edward at break
of a summer dawn (1471) while the monks were chanting matins in the
Abbey, and sustained a signal defeat. The place of slaughter is still
known as Bloody Meadow. The Duke of Somerset, with a few knights and
squires, took refuge within the sacred walls, but Edward and his
followers, hot for vengeance, rushed in to slay them even there. The
abbot, who had just been celebrating mass, came from the altar and,
holding the consecrated host high in his hands, stood between the
furious Yorkists and their prey. The war-wrath was for the moment
stayed, and Edward gave his word to respect the peace of the
sanctuary. But after a service of thanksgiving, the blood-anointed
king and his fierce nobles withdrew to a house hard by, where that
unhappy younger Edward, the legitimate heir to the throne, was brought
a defenceless prisoner into their presence, insulted, assailed, and
slain. The rumour went that the king himself had with his gauntleted
hand struck the royal youth across the mouth, and in an instant the
others, like wild beasts, were upon him, Richard of Gloucester in the
front. It is believed that the mangled, boyish body was buried in the
Abbey under the central tower.
But while the lords of Tewkesbury stormed through their brief careers,
coming one after another to lie, battle-bruised, stabbed, headless,
quartered, even with the halter-mark about the neck, within the holy
hush of the great church, its Benedictine monks went on a quiet way,
tilling the soil, writing glosses, copying service-books, chanting
prayers, exercising a large hospitality and a larger charity. At the
Dissolution, the townspeople, who had from time immemorial used the
nave as their parochial church, bought the choir and chapels from
Henry VIII, so that this noble structure, so significant in English
story, escaped the fate of Furness, Tintern, and the many more.
We had ourselves a little difficulty in getting beyond the nave. We
had gone in an hour before service on a Sunday evening, hoping to be
allowed to walk around the choir, but we incurred scathing rebuke from
a red-haired verger, who had practised like eloquence on Sunday
automobile parties until his flow of denunciation was Hebraic. We gave
way at once, expressed due contrition, and meekly sat down to wait for
evensong. Whereupon, after furtively scrutinising us from behind one
pillar after another, he cautiously approached and with searching
little blue eyes severely inquired if we really intended to stay for
the service,--"all through the sermon, ye understand; not just for the
music." Our reply so raised us in his opinion that he actually took us
on the rounds, proving an intelligent and even jocose conductor, and
we, for our part, heard the sermon to the very end, not daring to stir
from our places until the last note of "Milton's organ" had died away.
Many visitors come to this attractive old town, with its timbered
houses and pleasant river-walks, for the sake of "John Halifax,
Gentleman." The scenes of Mrs. Craik's tender romance, Abel
Fletcher's dwelling, the mill on the Avon, the tannery, the remains of
the famous hedge, the garden where the two lads talked, are pointed
out as soberly and simply as that ancient house in Church Street whose
floor is said still to keep the stain of princely blood, or the cross
where the Duke of Somerset and his companions, dragged from the
shelter of the Abbey in violation of the king's own promise, were
beheaded.
But the Severn, with ever-broadening flow, a tidal river now that
fills and shallows twice a day, bears onward to the sea. Her course
lies for a while through orchards and wheat-fields. The Cotswolds,
separating the Severn valley from the basin of the Thames and
constituting the bulk of Gloucestershire, rise in billowy outlines on
the east and, presently, Dean Forest, one of the few remaining patches
of England's formerly abundant woods, uplifts its "broad and burly
top" on the west. The earth beneath those oaks and beeches has hoards
of mineral wealth, and furnaces are scattered through the forest
glades. At Gloucester the Severn divides, that
"with the more delight
She might behold the towne of which she's wondrous proud."
And a fine old town it is, still keeping, in its four right-angled
streets, the original Roman plan. Large vessels can make their way up
the Severn as far as Gloucester, which Elizabeth, to Bristol's
neighbourly disgust, chartered as a seaport, though the Berkeley
Canal, opened in 1827, is now the regular channel. The cathedral
stands upon ground hallowed since the seventh century. This building,
for all the solemn grandeur of its Norman nave, is of most interest,
from an architectural point of view, because of its gradual
development of the Perpendicular style, gloriously manifest in choir
and cloister. Its masons seem to have been particularly ingenious, for
the building abounds in original and fanciful features of which the
Whispering Gallery is only an example. Its martyr is John Hooper,
Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. One of Mary's earliest victims, he
was sent from London back to Gloucester, where he was greatly beloved,
to be burned before the eyes of his own flock. Many royal prayers have
been murmured beneath these vaulted roofs, and many royal feasts of
Severn salmon and lamprey-pie held in the grey city. The Saxon kings
were much at Gloucester; William the Conqueror spent his Yule-tides
here whenever he could, and here, in the chapter house, he ordered the
compilation of Domesday Book; Rufus, Henry I, Henry II, and John often
visited the town, and Henry III, as a boy of ten, was crowned in the
cathedral. Parliaments were held in Gloucester by Edward I, Richard
II, Henry IV, and Henry V, and from Gloucester Richard III, with whom
murder had grown to be a habit, is supposed to have sent secret orders
to the Tower for the smothering of his little nephews. In a
side-chapel is the tomb of Robert, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the
conqueror. The effigy, of Irish oak, is so instinct with force and
vigour in its only half recumbent posture that the iron screen seems
really necessary to hold the Norman down. But the royal burial that
made the fortunes of the cathedral was that of the wretched Edward II,
whose canopied tomb in the choir became a favourite shrine of
pilgrimage.
Still the Severn, now with a burden of heavily freighted barges, a
mighty flood that has left more than one hundred miles behind the tiny
pool, three inches deep, in which it rose, sweeps on, past the stern
walls of Berkeley Castle, where Edward II was cruelly done to death,
toward the Somerset boundary. Here it receives the waters of the lower
Avon, on which the great port of Bristol stands, and so the proud
Sabrina leads her retinue of streams into the Bristol Channel,
"Supposing then herself a sea-god by her traine."
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Leland.
[8] "Gregory's Chronicle." In "Historical Collections of a Citizen of
London in the Fifteenth Century." Camden Society: 1876.
SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE
The three southwestern counties of England, Somerset, Devon, and
Cornwall, reach out, like the hearts of their sons, into the wild
Atlantic. Many a Westward Ho adventure was sped from Bristol,
Bideford, Plymouth, Dartmouth, and even from Topsham, which long
served as the port of Exeter. The far-sea Elizabethan sailors and
their dauntless commanders, those "Admirals All" whose praises a
living poet of these parts, Henry Newbolt, has sung, came largely from
this corner of England. The father of Sir Francis Drake was a
Tavistock tar. That dreamer of illimitable dreams, Sir Walter Raleigh,
was born in the little Devon village of East Budleigh. Another Devon
village, familiar to Raleigh's boyhood, Ottery St. Mary, is the native
place of Coleridge, whose immortal sea-ballad came into being just
over the Somerset border, in those radiant days when he and
Wordsworth, two young poets in the fulness of their friendship and the
freshness of their inspiration, would go wandering together, from
their homes in Nether Stowey, off on the Quantock Hills,--days
commemorated by Wordsworth in "The Prelude."
"Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved,
Unchecked we loitered 'mid her sylvan courts;
Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart,
Didst chant the vision of that Ancient Man,
The bright-eyed Mariner."
My first view of the Quantocks was had, some years ago, from Exmoor.
Coming through North Devon, we had been walking for hours, knee-deep
in heather, over that high, rolling moorland where the red deer still
run wild. The pollen rose in clouds about our heads. Black-faced sheep
and white-tailed rabbits and startled, flurrying heath-cocks shared,
but did not break, the rapture of that solitude. Bell-heather and
rose-heather and white heather mingled their hues, at a little
distance, in a rippling sea of purple. We lay down in it, and the
fragrant sprays closed warm about us, while the soft sky seemed almost
to touch our faces. We were supremely happy and we hoped that we were
lost. We had long been out of sight of human habitation, but our
compass served us better than we wished, and when, with a covert sense
of disappointment, though the sun was red on the horizon, we came at
last upon a woman and child gathering whortleberries in a dimple of
the moor, we learned that we were, as we should have been, in the
heart of the Lorna Doone country.
All lovers of Blackmore's delectable romance remember that its modest
hero, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare, was a Somerset man.
"Zummerzett thou bee'st, Jan Ridd, and Zummerzett thou shalt be." But
the Doone glen, which actually was, in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, the hold of a marauding band of outlaws, lies on
Badgeworthy Water, a part of the Devon boundary. We ate our handful of
whortleberries in Devon, but soon, following directions, found
ourselves on the brow of a steep incline, peering over upon a
farmhouse, known as Lorna's Bower, in the valley below. Scrambling
down the declivity as best we might, we crossed the Badgeworthy by
means of a log and a hand-rail, climbed a fence inhospitably placed
at the end of this rude bridge, and thus made unceremonious entrance
into Somerset. They were gruff of speech at Lorna's Bower, but kind of
heart, and treated the belated wanderers well, feasting us on the
inevitable ham and eggs, with a last taste of Devonshire cream, and
giving us the warm corner of the settle by the great, peat-burning
fireplace. A sheepskin waistcoat, with the wool yet on, lay across the
rheumatic knees of our host, and hams and sides of bacon dangled from
the rafters overhead.
According to the saying "It always rains on Exmoor," the next morning
broke in storm, and we made slow progress under the rain and over the
mud along the Badgeworthy. All our path was a Waterslide, yet we came
at last to the Doone valley, where tumbled heaps of stone mark the
site of the felons' houses. Foxglove and bracken and heather would
have whispered us the gossip of the place, but a sudden spurt of
especially violent rain drove us on to a shepherd's hut for refuge.
Two sportsmen, booted and spurred, with their horses saddled in the
shed, all ready to mount and ride if the Exmoor hunt should sweep that
way, were there before us. One of them told us that his own house had
the dints of the Doones' terrible blows on one of its oak doors. As
the weather had gone from bad to worse, we abandoned our walking trip,
bestowed ourselves in a creakity cart, the only vehicle there
obtainable, and drove past the little Oare church, where John and
Lorna were so tragically wedded, over "Robbers' Bridge," and on to the
top of Oare Hill. Here we paused for a memorable view of the
rain-silvered landscape, with Dunkery Beacon glimmering above. On
through blurred pictures of beautiful scenery we went, into the
village of Porlock, sweet with roses, and plunging down Porlock Hill,
we held on our gusty way to Minehead. The hostelries of this favourite
watering-place being full, we pushed on by an evening train to
Taunton, a fair town of heroic history. In the stormy times of Charles
I, it was twice gallantly defended by Admiral Blake, himself a son of
Somerset, against the cavalier forces. Forty years later, when the
unpopular James II had succeeded to his brother's throne, Taunton
frankly embraced the perilous cause of the Duke of Monmouth, welcoming
him with joyous ceremonies. In Taunton market-place he was proclaimed
king, and from Taunton he issued his royal proclamations. The Duke was
utterly defeated at Sedgemoor, three miles to the east of Bridgewater,
in what Macaulay designates as "the last fight deserving the name of a
battle that has been fought on English ground." The simple Somerset
folk who had followed the banners of Monmouth were punished with
pitiless severity. The brutal officers made a jest of the executions.
A range of gibbets, with their ghastly burdens, crossed the moor, but
Taunton was the especial victim of the royal vengeance. A hundred
prisoners were put to death there by Kirke and his "lambs," and
wellnigh another hundred hanged by such process of law as was embodied
in Jeffrey's "Bloody Assize."